It was a holiday insult added to all the usual, daily HP insults—the dirty tap water, the aggressive parking cops, and the annual surprise of supplemental property-tax fees. “Those fucking council incompetents! Again!” “¡Pinche ciudad de la chingada!” And when a certain, very metiche woman at the park suggested Luján was to blame, they began to head off in a group to his home, gathering more people on the way.
Councilman Luján appeared on the porch, hanging both thumbs on his belt, and even the children in the crowd seemed enraged, their high-pitched voices adding a feminine squeal to the crowd’s collective chant.
“¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres!”
“Out with the three?” Brandon asked no one in particular. “What’s that about?”
“They mean my dad and Councilwoman María and Councilman Vicente,” said Lucía, who was standing behind him. Sensing the boy was smart enough to understand, she quickly explained the political dispute that pitted her father and two allies against a corrupt mayor. “So whenever anything goes wrong, the mayor blames my dad. And his Special Friend, that lady in the back over there, she gets her rabble from el movimiento to come out and harass us because we want to reform things.” With that, Lucía stepped to the front of the porch and down the steps to the concrete path that ran through the front lawn, and leaned forward into a screaming shout: “Go home, losers!”
“¡Rateros!“ someone in the crowd shouted back, starting a new chant with the Mexican Spanish idiom meaning “bandit” or “crook.” “¡Ra-te-ros! ¡Ra-te-ros!”
“You stole the money for the fireworks!”
“Get out here and defend yourself like a man, Salomón. We see how you spent the money for the fireworks on your own party. ¡Ratero! “
Having heard Lucía’s explanations, Araceli scanned the back of the crowd and spotted the mayor’s Special Friend, a woman with a black head of hair-sprayed raccoon quills, her temples sporting identical white wings. She was light-skinned and small inside her wide summer paisley dress, and she held at her side a cell phone, which Araceli understood to be the instrument by which the Special Friend rounded up crowds and exerted her will. The Special Friend spotted Mr. Luján on the porch and gave him a long, self-satisfied stare, like a half-deranged chess master sizing up the effect of a game-changing move on her opponent. Finally she raised her eyebrows quickly, as if to summon a reply from her rival—but Mr. Luján seemed unfazed. “No hay que hacerles caso,” he said to his daughter and anyone else who would listen. Mr. Luján said this with calm conviction, a deepness of thought that hinted at reserves of belief and self-awareness. Now the Special Friend was back on the phone, summoning additional troops. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Mr. Luján were locked in a familiar struggle, the same one played out in village councils and big-city demonstrations in their native country, at inquests and in courtrooms, between those who understood that wielding power meant being a paternalistic shepherd to the stupid flock and those who dreamed of an Empire of Reason and a literate citizenry. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Councilman Luján were standing on opposite sides of Mexican history, even as they stood in the United States.
A man in the crowd wearing a backward baseball cap and an incipient beard stepped forward to stand on the edge of the lawn and send a glob of spit toward Lucía, causing Councilman Luján to remonstrate with the spitter and then to pull back his daughter to the safety of the porch.
Keenan, who had never seen an adult use his saliva as a weapon, grabbed Brandon’s hand for security. “What is this?” he asked his brother.
“I think it’s a lynch mob,” Brandon said with the amused detachment of an anthropologist describing some primitive rite. He took a weird comfort in the idea that he had stumbled upon another case where life clearly and obviously imitated literature. He had believed lynch mobs were creations of novelists and filmmakers, but here was one before him, with real people showing their canine teeth and twisting their faces into other expressions that suggested incipient revenge. “I’ve read about them in books. In this lynch mob, no one is carrying torches. But I guess torches are not, like, required for it to be a lynch mob.”
“What are they going to do?” Keenan asked. “Are they going to hurt us?”
“Well, I don’t see them carryi ng any rocks, so